Forestry

Forestry is the art, science, and practice of studying and managing forests and plantations, and related natural resources. Silviculture, a related science, involves the growing and tending of trees and forests. Modern forestry generally concerns itself with: assisting forests to provide timber as raw material for wood products; wildlife habitat; natural water quality regulation; recreation; landscape and community protection; employment; aesthetically appealing landscapes; and a 'sink' for atmospheric carbon dioxide. A practitioner of forestry is known as a forester. Often found assisting foresters are forest technicians, GIS specialists, and engineers.

This resource is for organizing the development of Forestry content on Wikiversity.

If you are knowledgeable in any area Forestry, feel free to improve upon what you see, we would greatly appreciate your contributions.

A forest is an area of land dominated by trees.^[1] Hundreds of definitions of forest are used throughout the world, incorporating factors such as tree density, tree height, land use, legal standing, and ecological function.^[2][3][4] The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization defines a forest as, "Land spanning more than 0.5 hectares (1.2 acres) with trees higher than 5 metres (16 ft) and a canopy cover of more than 10 percent, or trees able to reach these thresholds in situ. It does not include land that is predominantly under agricultural or urban use."^[5] Using this definition, Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020 (FRA 2020) found that forests covered 4.06 billion hectares (10.0 billion acres), or approximately 31 percent of the world's land area in 2020.^[6]

Forests are the predominant terrestrial ecosystem of Earth, and are distributed around the globe.^[7] More than half of the world's forests are found in only five countries (Brazil, Canada, China, the Russian Federation, and the United States of America). The largest share of forests (45 percent) are in the tropical latitudes, followed by those in the subarctic climate (boreal), temperate rainforest, and subtropic domains.^[8]

Forests account for 75% of the gross primary production of the Earth's biosphere, and contain 80% of the Earth's plant biomass. Net primary production is estimated at 21.9 gigatonnes of carbon biomass per year for tropical forests, 8.1 for temperate forests, and 2.6 for boreal forests.^[7]

Def. the "art, practice and science of planting and growing trees in forests"^[9] is called forestry.

Forest ecosystems have come to be seen as one of the most important components of the biosphere, and forestry has emerged as a vital field of science, applied art, and technology.

The study of forestry usually consists of many of the following areas:

• Forest Ecology
• Soil Science
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Forest Entomology and Diseases
• Wildfire Management
• Forest Inventory and Timber Scaling
• Silviculture and Silvics
• Forest Operations and Harvesting
• Wood Products
• Hydrology
• Wildlife Managment
• Range and Recreation Management
• Urban Forestry
• Road Engineering
• Law and Communication

"Desperate efforts by firefighters on the ground and in the air have saved the only known natural grove of the world-famous Wollemi pines from destruction during the record-breaking bushfires in NSW."^[10]

"The rescue mission involved water-bombing aircraft and large air tankers dropping fire retardant. Helicopters also winched specialist firefighters into the remote gorge to set up an irrigation system to increase the moisture content of the ground fuels to slow the advance of any fire."^[10]

"Wollemi National Park is the only place in the world where these trees are found in the wild and, with less than 200 left, we knew we needed to do everything we could to save them."^[11]

"Fossil evidence indicates that the trees existed between 200 and 100 million years ago and were once present across the whole of Australia."^[12]

The three redwood subfamily genera are Sequoia from coastal California and Oregon, Sequoiadendron from California's Sierra Nevada, and Metasequoia in China. The redwood species contains the largest and tallest trees in the world. These trees can live for thousands of years. Threats include: logging, fire suppression,^[13] climate change, illegal marijuana cultivation, and burl poaching.^[14][15][16]

Only two of the genera, Sequoia and Sequoiadendron, are known for massive trees. Trees of Metasequoia, from the single living species Metasequoia glyptostroboides, are much smaller.

The forest is part of the scattered remains of the ancient Silva Carbonaria or Charcoal Forest. The first mention of the Sonian Forest (Soniaca Silva)^[17] dates from the early Middle Ages. Then the forest south of Brussels was crossed by the river Zenne/Senne and extended as far as Hainaut, covering most of the high ground between the Zenne and the Dijle. The ninth-century vita of Saint Foillan mentions "the forest, next to the abbey of Saint Gertrude, called the Sonesian"^[18] In the sixteenth century it was still seven leagues in circumference. At the start of the 19th century the area of the wood was still about 100 square kilometres, but due to wood cutting its area diminished to its current area of 44.21 km².

The Forest extended in the Middle Ages over the southern part of the Duchy of Brabant up to the walls of Brussels and is mentioned, under the name of Ardennes, in Byron's Childe Harold: "And Ardennes waves above them her green leaves", beginning as the soldiers assemble who are soon to die at Waterloo. Byron was inspired by his visit to the site of the Battle of Waterloo in 1816; his note to this line: "The wood of Soignies is supposed to be a remnant of the forest of Ardennes, famous in [Matteo Maria] Boiardo's [Orlando Innamorato] Orlando and immortal in Shakespeare's 'As You Like It'.... I have ventured to adopt the name connected with nobler associations than those of mere slaughter."^[19] Originally it was part of the Forest of Ardennes, the Romans' Arduenna Silva, and even at the time of the French Revolution it was very extensive. A major blow towards its nineteenth-century contraction was struck when Napoleon Bonaparte ordered 22,000 oaks to be cut down in it to build the Boulogne flotilla intended for the invasion of England. King William I of the Netherlands continued to harvest the woods, and from 29,000 acres (120 km²) in 1820 the forest was reduced to 11,200 in 1830. Rights to a considerable portion of the forest in the neighbourhood of Waterloo was assigned in 1815 to the Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, who is the Prince of Waterloo in the Dutch nobility, and to the holder of the title as long as it endured; the present duke receives the equivalent of about $140,000 from his Belgian properties. "He has the rights to 2,600 acres (11 km²) of forest near the battlefield for as long as the dukedom does not become extinct and owns sixty acres outright."^[20] This portion of the forest was only converted into farms in the time of the second duke. The Bois de la Cambre (456 acres) on the outskirts of Brussels was formed out of the forest in 1861. In 1911 the forest still stretched to Tervuren, Groenendaal, and Argenteuil close to Mont-Saint-Jean, Belgium, and Waterloo.^[21]

Formerly the forest held the Abbey of Saint Foillan not far from Nivelles.^[22] The forest served for a long period as an exclusive hunting ground for the nobility, but today is open to the general public.

Since the 13th century, the Niepołomice Forest in Poland has had special use and protection.

The Niepołomice Forest is a large forest complex in the western part of the Sandomierz Basin, about 20 km east of Kraków (center).^[24] It is made up of a few protected areas which used to constitute a single virgin forest originally. The Niepołomice Forest occupies an area between Vistula and Raba rivers. The main complex covers about 110 km² (42 sq mi). It is situated between the towns of Niepołomice, Baczków, Krzyżanowice, Krzyżanowice and Mikluszowice.

Conifers are a group of cone-bearing spermatophytes (seed plants), a subset of gymnosperms that make up the phylum Pinophyta, also known as Coniferophyta^[25] or Coniferae which contains a single extant class, Pinopsida. All extant conifers are perennial woody plants with secondary growth. The great majority are trees.

Although the total number of species is relatively small, conifers are the dominant plants over large areas of land, most notably the taiga of the Northern Hemisphere.^[25]

While tropical rainforests have more biodiversity and turnover, the immense conifer forests of the world represent the largest terrestrial carbon sink. Conifers are of great economic value for softwood lumber and paper production.^[25]

"Continuous cover forestry (CCF) is not a new idea in forest management but there has been renewed interest in it for the potential it has to meet the sustainability requirements which are part of the Rio/Helsinki process and certification. Broadly speaking CCF includes those silvicultural systems which involve continuous and uninterrupted maintenance of forest cover and which avoid clearcutting."^[26]

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